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Wednesday, March 9, 2011

36 hours in a train

It has been 8 hours since I got off the train which brought me from Delhi to Bangalore in 36 hours, but as I type this piece of my thoughts, I feel the to and fro swaying as if I was still in the train. Quite unusually and against the reputation for Indian Railways, the train left from Nizamuddin and reached Yesvantpuram on time.

This time I decided to travel by the non-AC sleeper class as the weather was pleasant and it just didn't seem sensible enough to pay thrice the usual fare just for being able to charge and use Laptop the whole way. To my demise there were just two charging slots working in 9 sleeper cars and they refused to charge my laptop as they couldn't take the load. This made me feed hungrily on Digit's March issue I was carrying with myself. After I was done with it I started with John Grisham's Theodore Boone which a co-passenger was trying to read. Alas that even lasted for hardly 4 hours. So what I did all the way was sleep, admire the scenery and think.
Scenery was really great but I didn't bother taking pictures because I knew from my previous experience that in such a condition (moving train) I would have to take thousands of pictures out of which only a few would turn out good. Then I thought of getting down the train and taking pictures which triggered a dream in which I was trekking along the mountains with just a d-SLR and a GPS.
I couldn't help but think about the plight of Indian Railways. Why do they assume that people travelling in sleeper won't be having laptop computers or the other way round people with laptops will not travel in sleeper class? The standard of travel in Indian Railways needs to improve a lot. I have a suggestion of creating a non AC first class sleeper in which people with proper reservation would be treated in the similar way as the AC ones so there is more sense of security more comfort and less wait-listed passengers would think of tagging along somebody. The train was almost empty the whole way so the wait-listed passenger problem was not there but I couldn't help but imagine in how many ways the standard in which the Indian mass travels can be improved. eg there is perhaps a design flow due to which water from the tank over wash-room and presence of mirrors in every compartment instead of most desired plug-points. Thoughts also came flashing by when swarms of trans-gender beggars (hijras - as they are popularly called) and asked for money as if I owed them all I had. Seriously, this problem is out of hands and needs controlling now. For most part off the journey I couldn't find electric poles which meant we were travelling in diesel, and I wondered how, if at all, were all engines going green. On the whole the journey passed with its share of daydreaming, conversing, sleeping, actually dreaming and reading.


Trust me, I have experienced the worse train journey once http://bit.ly/h6Ksh9  and nothing can strike that chord again. So this journey was a good one.

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